On Film

...Allen exercises a comparable lack of judgment in his casting...

...Now, winning seems to be all there is for his one-time schlemiel, who is unchanged in other respects...

...At the beginning of Manhattan, Isaac—in his early 40s, the age of his creator—is in the middle of an unabashedly sexual relationship with a 17-year-old high-school girl named Tracy (Mariel Hemingway...

...When they first meet at an art gallery...

...But why should the director take pot shots at his own beliefs—especially by using as a mouthpiece a woman his persona ultimately loves...

...Apparently fearful of not being funny as well as serious, Allen accompanies the startling panoramic city scenes that open the movie with a Gershwin score and a comic voice-over narration...

...I was trying to deal with heavy emotions, heavy confrontations," he said in a recent interview, sounding for all the world as if he were a character in one of his parodies, interiors certainly was "heavy" ?leaden" would be a more apt description—particularly in its elaboration on the metaphor of the title: The story concerned this interior decorator, you see, and most of the action took place indoors, with a lot of introverts staring glassy-eyed out of windows, or blankly at blank walls...

...Waiting for her outside the Dalton School, outfitted in recognizably Allenesque regalia (Army/Navy surplus chic), he looks like a comic version of a dope peddler lurking aboul a schoolyard 10 hook young vitims...

...In other words, Allen is an anxious middlebrow...

...Because Isaac and Mary hate each other at first sight, weknovv they will presently fall in love...

...It is clear we are supposed to regard her—at least at the start—as irritating or even downright unpleasant...

...as they walk and talk indoors, they wend their way through artificial lunar landscapes and projections of the galaxies...

...her hysterical gestures, broken speech patterns and frazzled appearance are so predictable and boring that they are beneath comment...

...To top it all off, Isaac gets to bed Mary, thus establishing his superiority by conquest...

...he reassured audiences about their own inadequacies—that nothing succeeds like failure...

...her opinions are expressions of snobbery, rooted in cultural and psychological insecurity...

...A decade ago, when mores were rapidly changing, Allen successfully began to exploit his audiences' social insecurity by giving them someone to condescend to—his lovable and "nonthreat-ening" schlemiel...

...In last year's Interiors, for example, his blindness to his own pathetic pretensions was painfully apparent...

...He is still dropping a lot of facile one-liners ("Nothing worth knowing can be understood by the mind...

...All we can think is that the director invoked the complicity of nature in romance for the sole purpose of juxtaposing the tentative courtship with a bizarre setting that permits dramatic black and white shots...

...No wonder the inhabitants of his Manhattan are a homogeneous crowd of upper-middle-class, graduate-school-educated writers, critics, professors, and other middlebrows on the fringes of the literary world...

...The filmmaker claims he chose black and white because that's how Isaac sees the city—a pretty feeble justification that is a bit like saying The Miracle Worker should have been filmed in total blackness because Helen Keller was blind...

...Because the shnook has in the meantime been transformed into a "winner," he can hardly assume the role...

...Davis also scores with Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton...

...Allen's strained seriousness and inadvertent humor are again on display in his latest film, Manhattan, which he claims addresses ihe problem of living "a decent life amidst the junk of contemporary culture—the temptation, the seduction...

...Beginning with Annie Hall, however, the filmmaker—perhaps sensitive to the declining status of "losers" and "victims" in our egocentric age—changed his formula...

...Vet I suspect the image was not intended to be funny...

...Allen's persona was appealing in the past because he was such a loser...

...What we hear throughout this sequence is a humorous, albeit heavy-handed, counterpoint to what we see...

...Similarly, on the first date, in Central Park, a rainstorm forces Isaac and Mary into the Planetarium...

...To this end, the best defense is a good offense—reverse snobbery (like the reverse chic of wearing fatigue jackets...

...Unlike Peter Bogdanovich, who shot The Last Picture Show in black and white because the starkness of the medium perfectly conveyed the bleakness of the story, Allen merely seems to have attended too many photographic exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, where he sets an episode of Manhattan...

...Vale (Michael Murphy...

...In fact, the only real sacrifice Davis makes in the film is moving to a slightly smaller apartment—but the enormous rewards he reaps in terms of the approbation of his friends more than compensate...

...Later, she mocks what she calls "The Academy of the Overrated"—a group that includes Kierkegaard, Ingmar Bergman, Heinrich Boll, Isak Dinesen, and others who are all heroes to Isaac (and to Allen...

...These are the people Allen pictures in his film because they are also the audience—and will therefore love this movie about themselves...

...the on-again of f-again mistress of his married best friend...

...Murphy, the bland wasp-type, would doubtless be a starving actor if his good friend didn't keep hiring him...

...Manhattan begins by virtually screaming its seriousness: Not only is it in black and white, but Gordon Willis' cinemotog-raphy is elegantly and preposterously nuanced and grained...

...At one point, Isaac-Allen describes himself perfectly: "He longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices...

...So how do you keep from selling out...

...Allen wants to have it both ways, funny and serious, without risking a commitment to either...

...He wants to reassure both his audience and himself that it is really all right to be square, that one should not be intimidated by the highbrows...

...Mariel Hemingway, unhappily for a girl, has her father's features, making Isaac's adulation seem somewhat dubious...

...Since the entire affair is presented with solemn and "daring" casualness, sheer trendiness—sex with juveniles is in?seems the most important motive...

...His elocution is still lamentable (listen to him condemn something as "reeellly disgusting...

...His answer to that question is to sell out and pretend not to...

...In the post-"New Sensibility" era, when artistic standards are in disarray or nonexistent, Allen is catering to the widespread cultural insecurity by providing—a target...

...By contrast, in the relatively minor role of Isaac's ex-wife, who has left him for another woman (another "daring" touch), the talented actress Meryl Streep is totally wasted...

...The only possible solution is to create a pretentious, trendy intellectual who on the one hand is unsympathetic —so that the Allen persona and Allen himself are spared being labeled pretentious or trendy—and on the other hand speaks in properly highbrow rhetoric—so that Allen cannot be accused of Philistinism...

...Mary—a vaguely "literary" journalist—derides Isaac's preference for plexiglass sculptures she considers "purclv derivative...

...Keaton is beyond criticism by now...

...For what counts is not genuine understanding, it is having the right attitudes—as prescribed by Allen, of course, who has a reasonably bright undergraduate's knowledge of art, literature and philosophy...

...As always, his writing and directing are aimed at marketing his own virtue, or rather that of his familiar persona, here christened Isaac Davis...

...He was too romantic about New York," Allen declares, revealing himself through Isaac, who views the city as "a metaphor for the decay of our culture...

...Until hestops selling out by flattering his audiences, and until he can be serious without undercutting himself a moment later in a paroxysm of middlebrow anxiety, Woody Allen will continue to be a pathetic clown...

...she also praises some minimalist steel cubes that he had found incomprehensible, expounding on their "negative capability...

...And he is still sloppily sentimental (when Isaac has a change of heart after his affair with Mary, he races crosstown to his true love?Tracy—and catches her just as she is about to fly off to London...

...For instance, the music climaxes precisely as fireworks explode on screen...

...These are the people who make it possible to read reviews instead of books, who predigest experience for vicarious intellectual thrill seekers...

...As Isaac, Allen is, unfortunately, Allen...

...In the process he fashions some incredibly clumsy moments...

...There is no discernible artistic reason for this, besides the simple-minded determination to be different in our technicolor age...

...The reasons for their initial dislike, though, are an important clue the hidden message of Manhattan...

...The city is really changing," a character declares in one scene, and the camera lingers on a building being torn down...

...Naturally, this heroic gesture comes after years of success and, one presumes, of accumulating a financial cushion...

...Dav is is a TV comedy w riter who defiantly decides to quit his well-paying job and concentrate instead on writing a novel...

...f such pandering were not odious enough, the form of the film is worse than the content—and even more revealing of its maker's insecurity...